Wednesday, May 21, 2014

5-21-14

In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing "just about always or most of the time "; today, 19 percent do.--George Will

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Did You Know . . .?

A month after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, a massive typhoon hit the city, killing 2,000 people.

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HISTORICAL EVENT

On this day in 1942, 4,300 Jews were deported from the Polish town of Chelm to the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor, where all are gassed to death. Sobibor had five gas chambers, where about 250,000 Jews were killed between 1942 and 1943.

Also on this day, the German firm IG Farben set up a factory just outside Auschwitz, in order to take advantage of Jewish slave laborers from the Auschwitz concentration camps. As time passed, the Western powers broke the company up into three separate divisions: Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF.

Al Franken is an American politician who is the junior United States Senator from Minnesota, where he has served since 2009. Prior to serving in the Senate, he was a writer and performer for the television show Saturday Night Live(SNL) from its inception in 1975 to 1980 and from 1985 to 1995.

Fairuza Balk is an American film actress. She made her theatrical film debut as Dorothy Gale in Disney's Return to Oz. Balk also made appearances in Valmont, The Craft, The Island of Dr. Moreau, American History X, The Waterboy, and Personal Velocity: Three Portraits.

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"Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig."
--Stephen Greenblatt